ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Alan L. Hoffman, Pete Gurevich, Jim Grossnickle, John T. Slough
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 2 | September 1999 | Pages 109-125
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A96
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Compact toroids can be used for fueling other fusion devices by accelerating them to high enough velocities to penetrate strong magnetic fields. In the simplest analysis, the kinetic energy density of a flux-excluding object 1/2v2 must exceed the magnetic field energy density B2/20 of the field to be pushed aside. Field reversed configurations (FRCs) are a type of compact toroid that are particularly efficient for this application due to their high density and thus lower required energy per unit mass. FRCs are also formed and accelerated inductively, thus minimizing possible impurity contamination. The Tokamak Refueling by Accelerated Plasmoids (TRAP) experiment was built to develop the inductive acceleration method and test the ability of high-velocity FRCs to penetrate transverse magnetic fields. Simple models have been developed for both the acceleration and penetration processes to determine fueler parameters required for a given tokamak field. Experimental results are given for the acceleration process. Half-milligram FRCs with number densities of 1022 m-3 were accelerated to velocities of 200 km/s, sufficient to fuel tokamaks with Tesla magnetic fields. The technology is easily extendable to much higher FRC densities and velocities, sufficient to fuel the largest, highest-field tokamaks.